City Under the Moon (39 page)

The soldiers took their tentative steps, but she knew it was clear. She bolted for the stairs, racing over fallen bodies and ruined furniture.

“Where are you going?” called Jaguar.

“It’s all clear!”

The stairwell was tight, with brick walls taking arbitrary turns around uneven landings. There was no 72
nd
floor at all; its passing was marked only by an etching on the wall. The 73
rd
was a half-story of twenty-seven hundred square feet, surrounded by the triangular windows cut into odd geometry. She crossed between a water tank and the tower elevator’s motors to turn and ascend further.

“Valenkov!” she screamed. So close.

“Stati așa!”
Ilecko called from below.

Up she went, past a dark room with transformer coffers and an abandoned radio station. The temperature dropped with each step, ten and then twenty below zero.

Finally, the last steps.

Eighteen narrow slabs of concrete, covered in a thick skin of frozen blood.

And then there was the final door. The wind howled from behind it.

“Valenkov!” she yelled again.

She climbed the steps, slipping over the iced blood.

The door had no lock, only a loose handle. Her left hand vibrated as she reached for it; her right tightened on her silver-loaded Glock.

The door opened with no resistance.

Nineteen

Joint Base Andrews

5:55 p.m.

Colonel Murdock took a last walk around his aircraft, a supersonic bomber called the B-1B Lancer. Like all of the airmen, he knew her as the “Bone.” He had flown her over Iraq and Kosovo, saying a proper American good morning to the enemy with 2,000-lb JDAMs. Hell, damn near half of the bombs dropped on the Arabs came from Bones.

Murdock was at home in the air, and the Bone was his bachelor pad. From the profile, she looked like a supermodel: long and thin with a bulbous cockpit. With her variable-position swept wings, most folks assumed she was a fighter—but she was even better. Uncle Sam had mothballed their B-52 bombers and F-117 fighters in their rush up to the all-in-one F/A-22 Raptors, but they’d left the Bones running because they were the only bombers that could withstand a defense.

He walked each 150-foot side of the towering bomber as the maintenance crew finished up. The weapons loading team drove off with their trailer, leaving thirty CBU-191 cluster missiles in the three internal bomb bays.

He took a lingering look at the northern horizon. Everything looked fine from here, but somewhere out there Manhattan was burning.

He donned his helmet and climbed the ten-rung ladder on the underside of the aircraft. In the aft crew station, the system officers were running their pre-flight checklists. He slapped their helmets and crossed through the galley to the front cockpit, where his co-pilot was in prep.

Murdock took his seat before the Bone’s flight stick and checked his radio. “Command, this is the
Lunar Eclipse.
”

Twenty

The Chrysler Building

75th Floor

5:59 p.m.

There were windows on the 75
th
floor. It was open like a bell tower, a needle’s eye in the wild winds almost a thousand feet off the ground.

Thirty degrees below zero smothered Brianna Tildascow as she stepped into the deafening gyre. Her eyes fought to close, her skin went numb.

It was empty.

Frozen blood nearly covered the floor. Probably gallons of it, no doubt intended to misdirect Ilecko’s test. He’d used it to paint his message on beams and crossbar. “Find a cure.” Written in his own blood.

“He knows I track him.” Ilecko arrived behind her, followed by the Shadows. They took turns peeking into the tower and then retreating to the relative warmth of the brick stairwell.

She stood in the center, the winds pounding her from every side. She tracked the blood streaks, retracing his steps, following his ghost around the room. And even as she did, she could feel his eyes, watching from closer than over her shoulder. Watching her watch him.

“So what now, we’re screwed?” Jaguar asked.

“Two more hours ‘fore sunset.” Mantle said.

Jaguar asked Ilecko: “You got any other ways to track him?”

Ilecko had no reply.

“We can’t be done,” Lon said. “Right? Tildascow?”

“We’re not done.”

The last message he wrote was the largest. It was scrawled across the crossbeam facing the door. The blood had frozen almost as quickly as he’d smeared it on the metal. And then he’d poured his containers onto the floor—he’d had three of them. One he poured in the center, another along the edges, and the last down the stairs.

Down the stairs he went.

And she chased him.

“Where ya goin’?”

“After him,” she said.

“Hooah,” Mantle shouted, falling in line behind her.

“We’re going back down?” Lon whined.

She yanked out her radio, resisting the urge to smash it into the wall. “Silver Bullet, this is November Zero Zero One, we need ten-minute evac from the observation terrace of the Chrysler Building at the 61
st
floor, over.”

“This is Silver Bullet, November, roger on your evac. Proceed to the south terrace. Out.”

“Where do you go?” she muttered to herself, pounding down the stairs. Her footfalls rattled like a drumroll.

You go all the way down, onto the street. You stand in front of the Chrysler Building, looking up with satisfaction, knowing that’s where you’d trap us. And then where do you go?

Manhattan is going to be annihilated. You have to know that.

Where do you go?

You leave, dummy.

“Hold up!” called one of the Shadows.

“I’ll meet you there!” she yelled, unable to slow down, uninterested in trying. She navigated the turns through the eccentric upper floors of the crown, watching Valenkov do the same, and returned to the primary stairs.

The Green Berets were hollering on their radios, sending back word that Valenkov wasn’t here. She felt their eyes as she passed them, looking like she was on the heels of someone they couldn’t see.

And there were the other eyes, glowing in the forest, beckoning her to join them in the hunt. The pressure on her neck returned, pushing her down to all fours. She lifted her head and straightened her back, refusing to succumb.

The wolves were everywhere, empowering her to go faster, to lope and leap. The Green Berets and the walls and the stairs jockeyed against the forest and the call of flesh.

She found herself repeatedly snapping awake in mid-stride, each time groggier, further from her body and the material world.

No
. She bit into her hand. Her skin tore easily to her sharpened teeth.
Fight to stay here. Focus on the numbers.

67. 65.

61.

She blasted from the stairwell and followed the breeze through the hallway, passing through the darkening forest to reach the balcony.

The wind on the 61
st
floor terrace was downright balmy compared to the observation tower. Her boots crunched in trampled snow, a reminder that she was on concrete, not soil.

She stood at the very edge of the building, atop the southeast eagle gargoyle. Southern Manhattan was sprawled beneath her, jumbled dominoes in uneven stacks. Countless spotlights were playing hide-and-seek between the monolithic buildings and the thick plumes of smoke. The Hyatt Tower still shimmered orange from the flames below, but the ground was lost in blackout.

Tildascow felt a buzz in her palm, her post-hypnotic reminder to take her pills. That meant it was just after six, an hour until moonrise. The government was running out of time. Their last-resort scenario had to be underway.

She took her pills—a speedloader of six unmarked capsules in a gel pack—and shook her head clear. Even if she couldn’t see the ground she knew it was there, and she knew Valenkov had stood there, looking up.

And then where do you go?

The wolves were at her side, calling her.
Everything in her body and soul screamed to join them on four legs. He was there too, her would-be master.

She pulled off her glove, wincing as it stuck to where she’d just bitten into her flesh. She took a deep breath, steeling herself to bite again, to inflict enough pain to force him from her mind. And then—

—then she realized that if he was inside her mind, she could capture him.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, purging her thoughts and abandoning the physical. She reached deep into her subconscious, where she kept her inner truth, and she searched for the intruder.

What she found was sound.

A rushing waterfall of harmony crashed into her, cloaking her in sudden warmth and muting the residual noise in her mind, the buzz she’d never been able to escape. It was glorious music, a concordance of strings, and in the middle of it she found the first true silence she’d ever felt in her life.

So many hours meditating, such rigorous training to align her body and mind, and she’d never even imagined such harmony. And yet it was so breathtakingly simple.

Within the harmony, all concepts were one.

She could feel her own awareness: Wind. Smoke. Sirens.

And she could feel his awareness: Love. Rage. Howling.

The sound changed. It was ever so slight, but anything in comparison was harrowing discordance. The noise returned, the failure and the fear and the pain and the rage. Her heart cried abandonment.

Let me back in. Please. I’ll do anything you want.

A hand reached from within. A perfect, powerful hand she knew to be Demetrius Valenkov’s.

Come with me,
he said.
Come to salvation.

She took his hand and she wrenched him out.

Come fight me in hell.

The wolf attacked and she fled, naked and defenseless, suddenly unable to navigate the chaos in her own mind. Each refuge was more dangerous than the last. The FBI, the Army, the halfway houses and juvie halls and detention centers, the nights on the streets, the fights and the rapes. The wolf had turned her against herself, and their horrible noise smashed down every door until finally even the walls crumbled. There was no place left to go but home.

But why was the front door open?

Not here. Please. Not here.

All of her conviction failed in a heartbeat. She wouldn’t go in, no matter if it cost her everything. She turned and waited for the wolf, standing on the gravel driveway where the limo had dropped her off, naked and dirty and bloody, and she prepared for an unconditional surrender.

But he didn’t come. In fact, as her dread subsided, she could hear the harmony again. It was emanating from within the house.

She ran toward the open door—there was Chester, the best dog ever! And the cement path was clean; she couldn’t remember them ever not covered in bloody footprints. There were their names!

Mom + Dad + Brianna ‘82

She barreled through the door.
Mom! Mom!

And there was Mom. The harmony was her soft lips, her glowing eyes, and her golden curls; so safe and warm. She smiled low and her eyes scrunched, and Brianna knew that meant she was going to tell her she loved her.

But the wolf was with them.

He ripped open her mother’s neck and the blood sprayed all the way to the ceiling. The harmony was silenced again.

The agony pushed at the transformation.

Leave the pain behind. Run with us.

No. I won’t give up the fight.

Find a cure. It is the only way.

There isn’t enough time.

You will not find me.

We don’t have to—

They will fail.

No, we—

I know.

She reached out and found his throat.

Clench
and she forced him to his knees, crushing his windpipe within her claw. His yellow eyes squinted as he groped, pulling her arms, swiping at her face. But she had him.

She lifted him away from her mother’s corpse. The blood dripped from the dining room ceiling, but it fell from vacuum-sealed metal.

She slammed him against the wall, knocking down their family portraits. He kicked off and they stumbled backward, tripping over her father’s body and onto the orange couch where she used to hide her extra Oreos.

The wolf crashed into a desk—no, it was a metal console. An ID card and a key ring sat on top of it. They were next to a hazy square of light, maybe a monitor.

She sprang from the couch, hitting hard at the top of his throat, trying to break his neck. His head plowed into clear glass, landing with a solid thunk that said his skull sloshed but didn’t break. The glass was a window, smeared by confusion, looking out over a clear, star-filled sky.

Suddenly there was a figure floating above them, a young and beautiful dark-haired woman in a dress of creamy silk. The harmony whispered from within her, as if she breathed it in and out. But she wasn’t breathing. Her head rested on her shoulder, her eyes were closed. And she wasn’t floating.

It was Ecaterina, his wife. And she was impaled upon a stake.

And then Tildascow was back on the Chrysler Building’s gargoyle, back to the freezing, smoky wind, looking out over the city, and not at the starry sky in Valenkov’s mind.

“Tildascow?” Lon asked. The others had arrived behind her. “You’re not gonna jump, are you?“

“No, I’m just—“ Rather than explaining, she reached for her radio. “Silver Bullet, this is November Zero Zero One, we are ready for pickup. What’s your ETA?”

“Roger that, November,” responded Beethoven. “Be advised, a Black Hawk is en route.”

Weak cheers came from the team, and then weaker laughs at the weakness of their cheers.

“Roger that, Bullet,” Mantle responded over his own radio. “Thank you kindly, my brother. November Out.”

“See you in the red zone, guys. Bullet out.”

Tildascow went back into her mind, re-examining everything she’d just seen. The vacuum-sealed metal on the ceiling, the console with the keys and the ID ring, and Ecaterina—they came from his mind. There were glowing monitors on the console, and he was near a window looking out on a clear night sky.